


the only thing my father gave me was a black eye

by Anonymous



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Blood and Violence, Introspection, M/M, Minor Character Death, deep emotional trauma and mental instability, except it ends kind of good, orphan keith exploring the concept of having a family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-14 14:44:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20193985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The desert is an unforgiving friend and a forgiving enemy. Sometimes, he swears he sees something out of the corner of his eyes - forgetting is the easy part.





	the only thing my father gave me was a black eye

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was written july 2017, ive watched only up till season 4, i quite dont care about the fandom anymore and im just posting it after cleanig it up a bit cos i thought it'd be a waste to scrap a 4k words finished vent fic; if you read, thank you

This is how it goes:

Now, Keith, I'm telling your story here. I'm telling your story because you've got twelve stitches in your mouth in all the wrong places and god knows if you'll be able to speak again. And you don't want to tell this story yourself anyway. I mean, I understand, I can't blame you. After all, I saw it, I was there. I was watching but the lights were flickering for the longest time, right overhead everything you want to change but can't. On and off, on and off. Maybe that is just your consciousness fading in and out and you forgot how to make the difference. Maybe, I am a part of you as well and this is the only way you figured you won't be haunted in your dreams. You were so alone for so long. Don't worry. I loved you with the love you never got to receive but -

\- that's the short straw, isn't it?

I loved you, Keith, and I was right to tell you to expect happiness even with your face against the sidewalk and somebody's shoe (don't pretend you don't know whose, we all know the soles of these boots better than your own hands; they all wear these fucking boots) on the nape of your neck, breaking bones, bones, bones. Your arms were turned the wrong way up.

What a gruesome thing you were. I hurt for you as well, I cried for you and begged and begged and begged when you wouldn't. You would never but you did because I did.

What I'm saying is (and I seem to be an awful storyteller in all the ways you were as well) I died a long time ago. I'm not mad at you. It was not you who killed me.

There's a reason for everything, remember. There's time for everything, and that one is just not yet passed. In the end, you'll understand.

The desert is dry. There's no other way to describe it. Keith licks his lips and he feels his tongue, like sandpaper, he feels the heat on the insides of his mouth. It's scalding. Something he'll never get used to. And the thing is, there are sometimes, these awful things he sees. The air trembles around him, calling, the air trembles around him like a string seconds away from breaking, the air, this hot air that drinks away at him. There are things he sees and sometimes he almost hears the loud crack of something opening against the kitchen tiles. Don't worry, you've never been there. You weren't old enough to remember. These flowers are not for you.

(You're funny like that, Keith. You think there were flowers at my funeral. What a soft kid, trying to give me the last bit of tenderness he had in himself.)

The desert doesn't let him think. For months he believes that the silent, almost devastated call, of somebody, something, underground, right under the soles of his boots, is the sound of crying in his own head. There's nobody to tell him otherwise. After all, it's not words. He's not once heard a word except all those - (fuck off kid-; jesus- fuck you why are you still here; where the fuck are you keith ! oh my god kid, once i find you-) - he doesn't remember them all. He wishes he remembered none.

And when the sky comes crashing down Keith feels the metallic crackling of electricity under his skin. Keith feels the storm in his skin.

Well, in most ways, in all the ways that count, it comes. The storm comes with him six feet underground with his mouth filling with water and the forearms of a boy he was once supposed to know touching his, and the boy (lance, his mind supplies; it's an easy name to remember; he wonders how he forgot in the first place) - the boy's skin is cool to the touch. He's sure there's something to be said here about the way his body trembles with exhilaration but he's sworn to never lend an ear to empty words.

"Pidge, the controls are going haywire." Lance prods, urgency in his voice, and there's so many sounds - the panel is beeping so loud, the frantic sound of Lance hitting buttons the purpose of which he doesn't even know, Pidge giving instructions over the coms and it's too fucking much. He maybe kind of hates this part.

"Tell me what you see, Lance, I can't do anything about it if you -." Static, static, static.

"Well, if I had any idea what the fuck I was seeing -" Unfinished sentences. The lights overhead Keith are flashing madly, pupils opening and closing like camera lenses and suddenly -

Static, static, static.

Then nothing.

"Pid-"

"- the re- maybe if you--" 

"some-... -wrong but I-"

"La-..-eith"

He's aware, somewhere in the back of his head, that he is being talked to, that he is expected to act. He can't. His hands are frozen.

"Keith." Lance's voice is uncharacteristically quiet, his face warped into worry over the display screen, malformed. Fucking weird. Everything looks so goddamn surreal. "Are you okay, man? Don't go zoning out on us, we need you here."

Keith takes a deep breath. He's underwater and his head is spinning into whirlpools the same way his air has been punched out of him. His heart is in his ears and it's the only thing he can hear.

"Yeah, fine." He says and blinks into focus. "Fine."

_You were almost here, Keith. You were almost here but not quite. You almost knew._

There's a war at the edges of this universe. Keith's never been there, of course, but he supposes it's like that - a sharp end and if you look too much into what comes after it, then that's that. He's seen people like his older not-quite brother come home from it. Shiro still wakes up screaming about the blood in his mouth and how much it hurt to cut off your own arm with the rusty knife you bought at the price of your friend’s life. He says it tastes like copper coins, like he swallowed all the honour badges that they put in his empty coffin because he's never coming back and they didn't find a body to pin them on. Keith knows sometimes Shiro wishes he had died back there with his open knuckles and his rib piercing his lung because it is much easier that way. Those who lived have to bear knowing that some didn't.

There's a war at the edges of this universe.

"It's not my war, though," Keith says. His tongue is heavy in his mouth. Lance is sitting next to him in the main room and there's nobody else.

For a while, Keith thinks, maybe there's nobody else in this world.

"It's not your war," Lance repeats. "But it is mine. We choose our battles and I have something to fight for. I chose to make it mine."

Lance doesn't say "what about you?". He doesn't have to and Keith doesn't answer.

"I'm calling it." Shiro says and it's in that authoritative tone that sometimes reminds Keith he used to be his direct superior once. That Shiro used to be the poster boy for all the suicide missions they sold like dreams back on Earth. He'd call it home but home is - shit, shit - well, Keith is seventeen years too late to call anything home anymore. "Keith, turn back."

They'd gone over this - Allura briefing them in their self-proclaimed conference room like she always did, Coran adding useless information that always proves to be useful in the end. Keith's fingers had been wrapped around a cup of hot tea made from some unknown herb. It had tasted nothing like anything he'd ever tried. Not bad, just different. They'd gone over this - Keith and Pidge were to inspect a planet called Haen, alleged home of a Galra base, if their information were to be trusted. It was a sand planet, Allura had said, completely empty, and the sand seemed to be made out of a reflective material, almost like an infinite number of mirror shards. Haen is, admittedly, a great hiding place because of the visual illusions it provides that serve as camouflage.

"I won't-" He says and stops himself. Tries again. "I'm right there. I can find something, _ anything _."

Pidge had gone back the first time Shiro had asked. Keith is imperfect like that.

"I said come back. This is not up to debate."

"I'm almost there, Shiro!"

"Keith, there is no there!" Shiro yells. His voice is thunder. "There's nothing there. It's empty." Quieter. Like he's talking to a child.

How does that make you feel, Keith?

The red lion is roaring into his subconsciousness like it wants to rip out whatever Keith feels has settled onto his heart. His eyes scan the planet one more time, the empty horizon of it as if it's a desert but it's so damn cold. The sand is almost holographic and he sees his red shadow pass over. He could be out there, the heavy boots of his suit sinking in the landslide doing something-, something - anything.

How does it make you-

(it makes him feel goddamn angry, okay. it takes him, clenching his teeth for a whole minute, to calm down enough to breathe properly.)

He turns his lion back without a word.

It makes him so angry. That's why he would never make a fucking leader.

Morning finds him awake, sitting in his room, with his leg up, wrist posed carelessly over his knee. Keith thinks, morning doesn't find him at all. There is no morning in space, only the conscious passage of time that they have all become somewhat aware of, if only out of necessity. For Keith, space is empty. There's nothing happening. And in this kind of emptiness, he's become two-dimensional, boiled down to the simple essence of what he is made of - fear. It's the only thing he can think of. There's nothing else to think about in space.

Ah, but aren't you lying to yourself again, Keith? Sometimes, don't you sometimes think of those cold hands that touched you once and never again? Didn't they feel like forgiveness on your skin? Look, you can't lie to me.

The voice in Keith's head has always sounded, blissfully, preciously, like the voice of the mother that he never had.

Well, he's known for a while now, that he only yearns for which he cannot have.

In the nothingness of the morning which might as well be night, he falls asleep again.

The time comes, unfortunately. Keith hates it but by now that's a list that never stops growing. He feels in the marrow of his spine, all these pains he can't forget. How did we become so broken so young.

The time comes, like Shiro said it would, though Keith doesn't want to believe that Shiro could have known because if he had it would have all been Shiro's fault. Keith doesn't want to talk about it but Shiro is gone and no amount of blame-placing is going to bring him back.

(Keith, you don't know how this world works. Bite your tongue but there will always, always be scars. Where are yours?)

There's only a few truths Keith hates. Now, one of them - Keith has never wanted to be like his parents, all nine sets of them, including the first one. All different sorts of pain and hate, and heartless. He said: "I'm never going to be like that." The sad thing is that they all say that. The truth he hates is - this - after a while, even if you don't want to, you get used to it. After a while, the smell of blood doesn't make you want to throw up and you say it was inevitable but Keith can't bear to think like that. If he did, he would be letting go of the last thread of human he has in himself. It’s becoming less and less these days, it seems.

Keith can't lead them but Shiro's lion chooses him anyway. He thinks, maybe she's grieving as well, maybe she just doesn't care, maybe she just chose him out of misplaced loyalty to her original paladin. After all, he still thinks he'll never have the right to call her "Black", he thinks he'll never have the right to talk to her like Shiro did. It doesn't do anything for the emptiness he feels when she doesn't talk to him either but maybe he deserved that one. It's only fitting that she would also think of him as lacking.

Pidge reacts almost as badly as him, only more violently. He would be jealous of her spite and how openly she lets herself be angry if he had the right to. She says - what he never could, - she says:

"I already lost Matt!" Her voice is rough and loud, shatteringly pained. She lets it all show. "How can I lose Shiro now!"

Then, quieter. "This team is my only family now. I'm not giving up on anybody."

Keith turns his head and doesn't say anything. Allura's hand is on Pidge's shoulder as Pidge wipes at her eyes and Keith knows that Allura is holding up all the weight that Pidge can't put on herself, like a shield, like a titan. In space, there's not much that grounds them. He leaves, not trusting himself and the tongue he never learned to keep behind his teeth. It could earn him only so many beatings. None of them tries to stop him from leaving. They all have their shadows to work with.

He walks down to the control room, for the sole purpose of laying his forehead down at the glass and focusing his eyes on space. He tries to imagine Shiro, a hundred light-years from them but even that seems to blur out at the edges. 

Keith wonders, sometimes, if this is _his _war. It’s a war for sure and Lance knows what to fight for in it. It’s a well-known fact that Lance has got nothing besides his family to think of and he does so with the most wonderful, beautiful expression of longing and love. He talks, voice soft, lost in the flow of memory, about his mother, his brothers and cousins, his older sister and how they’d used to fight.

She has studied martial arts, he says, and she could beat me to a pulp, I was a scrawny kid, you know? Unlike now. But whenever somebody bothered me, she would fix their jaw anew.

Somewhere around there, Keith’s brows furrow, a quiet disoriented discomfort stirring in his chest. Lance looks at him as well, through the corner of his eye, attuned to Keith’s every move.

"You could always just ask." His words are half an exhale. "Stop looking at me like that."

"What will this question cost me?" He asks, half-jokingly. It wouldn't cost him anything. Or rather - there's nothing Lance wouldn't give. It almost makes Keith pity Lance for being so naive but he knows he can't because that's just another thing he likes about him. It almost makes Keith mad with happiness and guilt that Lance loves them all so much. "Okay, okay, I'll ask. Why does it hurt to hear about family?"

It's not the question Keith expected to be asked. It hurts more than he could say in words and he breathes in a rattled breath. Lance must have seen it and Keith isn't surprised in the least - after all, it was so obvious.

"You don't have to answer," Lance says, ready to give Keith a way out. Keith is thankful for it but he won't take it. He's had a life of running away. "You don't owe me anything."

"I know." He says and then says nothing.

His throat stays closed up for a long time. When he manages a breath, the answer on his tongue tastes like acid and the cigarettes he stole from the countertop of his last father. "My mother died before I could remember her. I had no other family so I was all alone. I switched eight foster homes before packing my shit and getting the hell out of there. It was hell. It was hell." He doesn't have to see the look on Lance's face. He saw Lance's whole body convulse with the shock of it from his peripheral vision. "No. No, don't say anything. I've told you this. I don't want to tell you any more."

Lance breathes in. He keeps quiet.

That's not the whole truth, Keith, is it? Tell him about your mom and your dad and how his fist made her bite at her tongue but the final blow was her head smashed in the kitchen tiles. Tell him about the fact that you were too young to remember it but you were still there when it happened. Tell him how she must have closed her eyes to the sight of a son she never was to hold.

Keith doesn't say anything. It's all too gruesome, - your scars, Keith, both literal and otherwise - and even here, decades away from all the places he never called home, the pain is so numbing it feels he might cease to exist. A kid that was never meant to be in the first place.

"Was there ever a foster family you liked?" 

Keith thinks, maybe this is safe enough. As safe as it will get. None of them - his team, his team - know how to be tactful, nor gentle. They love, with all their jarred edges and rough-handling hands. Keith can handle it. It's not as if his heart is soft.

"No, not really." He smiles, fondly. Not really. "But I had a younger sister once. It wasn't all bad. I liked being the respectable older brother though I was neither respectable nor that much older."

There were also times like that, right, Keith? You were happy a few times, not that it ever lasted.

"I think you would have been a great older brother," Lance says, though it's solemn. He's not trying to make a joke of it like he does when he's trying to deflect from his own sadness as not to worry his teammates. "I would have liked to see that."

Lance isn't much different after that. It is Keith, however, who is different - the paranoia is a poison, slowly eating through his rational conception of what's real and not. He starts searching for the pity in Lance's eyes, starts getting furious, any time Lance asks him if he's alright. Lance doesn't pity him, of course - he's always been attuned to the feelings of all those around him. He knows what Keith needs and this infuriates him all the more. Keith is a wounded animal and he let somebody see the vulnerable parts.

It's not long before he can't stand it anymore.

"You can't fix me, Lance." He says and his hands cover his face as if he's going to cry. He's not. He hasn't cried in years and he's not going to cry now. "These kinds of things don't get so easily patched up."

Keith should know where to stop. He should know that there are things he will regret one day. He's never been known for thinking past the first impulse.

"I get it now," Keith says, breathing in and it feels like he's chewing on glass. "You wanted to help yourself, right? You want to feel big, like you've always wanted to, like a hero! You wanted to save somebody, right!"

And then it hurts. It hurts like almost nothing ever has and then some. It hurts but it's a pain he can't talk about because it's like this - driving the knife through your own heart and then waiting for somebody else to pull it out. He's not allowed to speak of it. He's used to sabotaging his own damn self, putting his foot in front of the other to trip himself at the starting line. He doesn't deserve anything. Even Lance is going to leave him now.

"I don't want to fix you, Keith." He whispers, trembling and choked with emotion. "I want to be there for you. I want to be there."

Lance doesn't touch him, that would be in poor taste. And Keith doesn't want to be touched either, not when he's so fragile he feels he might break. Lance doesn't wrap him up in his arms but he stays on his knees, face against face, and waits for Keith for the longest time. Keith doesn't cry but when he lifts up his face Lance's eyes are blood-shot red. For the first time, it's quiet in his head.

(Now, this, is the moment I died. We have a final story to tell. I, as well, will be your closing act.)

This is your story, Keith, but it is mine just as much. You know the truth and the dark underbelly of your own mind and, of course, you know whose voice my voice is. Not that you remember it, not really, but you made me up entirely and this is just the finishing touch of your trembling hand.

This is it, Keith, the mother that clutched you in her arms as the final blow landed, right into her gut, driven home where she bore you with love. Or so you imagine. After all, you're told, the bitch died protecting you.

And don't cry, I know it was lonely. It was a terrible, terrible place and you imagine a mother's embrace would have been warm, you imagine it soft, you imagine sinking into her like a sigh. This voice, as much as you can summon it in your mind, is the closest thing you can imagine.

And I was there for you, Keith. You may have been halfway to mad but I was the only home you had, and I loved you. After all, that's what mothers do, even if you made this one up to keep the other half of your sanity.

This is your story, Keith, and I was just part of it. 

In many ways, I died seventeen years ago, under the fluorescent lights, sprawled above the only thing I held on to dearly. In the last of ways, I die today, in the half-embrace of a boy that says he doesn't want to fix you. Of course, of course, he doesn't. Because he loves you, not despite the scars but because of them.

So this is how I finally die. This is how you finally let me go. Surely, not me, but the idea of this love. It’s not as sad as you would think.

So this. This is your story. And it ends with a family, the way it began. The way it always does.

(He’d loathe to admit it but when Lance finally puts his cold hand on Keith’s cheek, it’s like a towel on a feverish child and he sinks right into it.)

**Author's Note:**

> kisses guys. thanks to whoever managed to get thru this whole thing


End file.
